Until recently Nicholas Curtis was chief executive of what was a struggling medium-sized mining company based in Sydney. But this month the White House and the Pentagon summoned him to Washington DC. Next month he will fly back to the US to testify to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Armed Services.

The reason for the meetings with spooks and security officials is that Curtis’s company,
Lynas Corp,
produces rare earths, an obscure commodity used in everything from car batteries to wind turbines to missile guidance systems.

Since China punished Japan over a territorial dispute by cutting rare earth exports, China’s global dominance of the market for these obscure minerals has preoccupied global leaders from US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton
to Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They are all rushing to find alternative sources of supply to Beijing, which controls 95 per cent of world production.

The world price of rare earths has jumped about 300 per cent in the past year and share prices have soared for hopeful Australian rare earth mining companies including Lynas,
Alkane Resources
and
Arafura Resources
.

In the long term, however, Australian executives are also concerned about all the attention from governments.

Politics is already interfering with their attempts to attract foreign investors and market their products. They also fear Western governments paranoid about China could subsidise too many uneconomical rare earth projects, which could eventually drive down prices and render their business unviable.

Lynas Corp’s Mt Weld, which comes on stream in 2011, the first major new supply source in a decade, is on the front line of that dilemma. “If there is a project that’s not able to be supported by the market, I don’t see the wisdom of the government stepping in," says Curtis. “There is a shortage, but it’s not a crisis."

Ian Chalmers, managing director of Alkane Resources, whose Dubbo plant will start producing in 2013, will be a relatively small producer but Chalmers is specially worried about the spooks because his plant produces the heavy rare earth elements needed in magnets that power military equipment.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

“If you are in the US military today and you have got magnets in your missile guidance systems and magnets in the navigation systems of your jet aircraft and you have realised they have come from China you are going to be a bit paranoid," says Chalmers. “But if the US producers are getting an advantage because they are being assisted by the US government, that would be a concern to anybody outside the US."

That is certainly not a concern for the big global consumers of rare earths. The lower house of the Japanese Diet has just passed a bill allocating up to ¥100 billion ($1.2 billion) for soft loans and government-sponsored investment insurance for rare earths projects. Japanese companies, which consume as much as half the world’s rare earths, have rushed in the past few months to sign deals with India and Vietnam to finance mining and processing plants.

In the US, Republican congressman Mike Coffman from California has sponsored a bill that provides for cheap loans to encourage production. The primary beneficiary will be Molycorp, a company based in Coffman’s electorate that was mothballed a decade ago, and is now hoping to reopen by 2012. Molycorp said in its annual report last week that it was counting on cheap US Department of Energy loans to help finance its operations.

Nath Shillin, a spokesman for Coffman, stresses that the bill would only make loans when market circumstances justified it.

The issue in Washington is seen as a test of whether the Obama administration is tough enough on China. The Pentagon has drafted an internal report on the issue on which Coffman and others were recently briefed.

While security hawks blame the sudden shortage of rare earth on China’s diplomatic brinkmanship, Australian miners point out that prices went nowhere for a decade and started to rise a year ago for quite innocent reasons. China has recently moved to clean up the industry and crack down on black market and out of quota exports. Faced with growing demand from domestic consumers, it halved export quotas from August this year to give its manufacturers first refusal.

But it was not until September 21, when a Chinese fishing trawler was seized after colliding with two Japanese coast guard vessels near disputed islands in the East China Sea, that the crisis became political. Japan refused to release the captain for two weeks and China responded by unofficially blocking all rare-earth shipments to Japan. Japan relented but the export ban remains in force.

The rare-earth market is expected to grow to about 190,000 tonnes a year by 2014-15, an increase of about 25 per cent, and Lynas estimates there will still be a global under-supply of about 20,000 tonnes, even considering new projects coming on stream. There are plenty of ore deposits around the world, but often in low grades, and they can be hard to refine, not least because some can be radioactive during processing.

Yasushi Watanabe, a professor at the Japanese National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, says Japanese companies have received only about 17,000 tonnes of rare earth ore this year compared with the usual 30,000 tonnes. They have tried to find alternative sources in Korea, France and Estonia and they are eating into stockpiles, but supply will run out in a few months.

He says Japan has no choice but to invest in rare earth production even if it eventually leads to a glut. “Now Japanese companies have realised that stable supply is the top priority and they are trying to decrease Chinese dependence," Watanabe says in an email interview.

China’s domination of the market is already making matters hard for Lynas. During the global financial crisis Lynas tried to raise cash by selling a controlling stake to China Nonferrous Metal Mining, the main Chinese producer. Lynas tried to anticipate security objections by setting up a structure that excluded CNMM’s directors from marketing decisions. But the deal was in effect blocked last September by the Foreign Investment Review Board, which prevented CNMM taking a majority stake.

Curtis says the strategic significance of rare earths was not the only thing that led the FIRB to block the deal, but it had played a role. “The FIRB would have done their research on a cross-department basis and they would have been very aware of the strategic significance of rare earths," says Curtis.

In Australia this month for the annual AUSMIN meeting, Hillary Clinton said she and Defence Secretary Robert Gates were talking to the Australian government about security of rare earths supply.

That might involve allowing Australian producers to sell to US stockpiles from Australia or bid for US loan funds.

But Chalmers of Alkane Resources says he is concerned that paranoia could block all future Chinese investment in Australian rare earth projects.

“There are a lot of these deposits around the world. If you start tampering with a project here it just means that a project in Asia or Africa will get a boost up," says Chalmers.

Both Lynas and Alkane are now busy signing up long-term customers, which will allow them to raise the finance they need. But China’s dominance of the industry has created an atmosphere of cloak and dagger.

In the past year, Lynas has announced the terms of six contracts with long-term buyers but it has refused to disclose the names of the customers.

Curtis says the buyers are not military or government, they are just commercial customers scared China will punish them for switching to Lynas. “It is because they are dealing with traders from China," says Curtis.

Chalmers of Alkane Resources says he has publicly announced that he won’t be selling any rare earths to China to reassure Alkane’s customers that it will not be pushed around by China.

One counter-argument for those who believe China is bent on world domination of the rare earths business is Perth-based Arafaura Resources, where the Chinese investor reduced ownership stake.

Arafura is currently 25 per cent owned by the East China Development Bureau. Arafura has a plan to mine rare earths in the Northern Territory and then process it thousands of kilometres south in Whyalla. It is a complicated venture that will take at least three years to get to market. The Chinese shareholder recently announced it would not take part in a proposed capital raising, which means its stake in the company will fall from 25 per cent to 17 per cent.